Re: Problems with xml-parse-string

[Chong Yidong]

Leo <address@hidden> writes:

> On 2010-09-23 00:59 +0100, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> FWIW, while I haven't use sml.el much, the little bit I've used it was
>> not particularly pleasant, partly because of the odd format. I don't
>> know how/why the xml.el was chosen and how much thought was put into
>> it, but my experience with it is not 100% positive.
>
> That looks like my experience too.

The main differences in the "new" format are (i) listing attributes as
(:foo bar) inside the element list, rather than in an alist after the
element name, (ii) listing text as (text "foo") rather than "foo", and
(iii) the as-yet-unresolved issue with XML namespaces, which probably
needs to be fixed in xml.c.

Point (i) is a broken design choice, as I already pointed out.  As for
(ii), it is a little nicer to take the cdr of each list member without
checking for stringp.  If others thing this is a really good change, I
won't object, though it seems pretty trivial to me.  We can add an
optional flag to the xml-* functions to toggle between the two
representations.